My quadrille notebook looks like Gmail

I've written before about how my writing in quadrille notebooks looks like web pages. I've been beta testing Gmail, and now in the last few days my paper notebooks have shifted their layout - they look like Gmail pages.

Down the left side I have a few "special" tags that I use a la "Getting Things Done" to remind me to look at my action list, events coming up, and anything I'm waiting for. That's followed by tags (or categories in the Socialtext wiki sense) that try to incrementally cover what I'm writing about at the time. And, confoundingly enough, there are honest to god advertisements a la Google's "adwords" that I write down the right side in the familiar adwords format. (note to self: get a scanner so I can show this properly).

The ads are often for things that would never show up in Google, but I can vouch for their relevance and click-through rate. And they work offline! The tags are handily the same tags that I use in del.icio.us when I tag things there and the ones I'll be using in my forthcoming wiki.

Alas, Typepad is not quite flexible enough in my hands to render this three-column style, in particular its "typelists" don't look quite like Adwords, and there's no way that I can see to get exacting layout of particular categories or tags on a given page.

I'm hoping this doesn't sound too weird - again when I get a scanner I'll throw something online.

Comments

[Prentiss Riddle]

Please do post some!

We need a word for the habits and techniques with which one organizes one's inboard and outboard brains.

[Jeff Kellem]

[ I attempted to make nice links. But, typepad kept removing them everytime I previewed. So, apologies for the full URLs in the text. I almost added a question to http://www.socialtext.net/vacuum/index.cgi?quadrille_notebooks, but the wiki is geared more toward edits than annotations or comments. ]

It seems that most quadrille notebook makers use lines that are a bit too dark for my tastes. Something like Tufte's graph paper (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters - at the bottom of the page, alas no named refs), but on non-archival paper would be nice. For many things, archival paper is not necessary and just too expensive for random notes.

Do you have a preferred source for quadrille notebooks?
[ I just noticed that you do list your current preference - Roaring Springs - in http://www.socialtext.net/vacuum/index.cgi?colophon ]
Are they the typical "dark" lined notebooks?

[Ed]

Some brands I've used over the years:

Rhodia makes a wonderful orange covered quad ruled pad with detachable pages in all kinds of sizes, from pocket size to tabloid. I do prefer bound pages.

My local college supply store (Michigan Book and Supply) stocks usually one of Roaring Spring, Mead, or National Brand - whatever is cheapest for them, presumably. Prices vary widely from $2 to $7 for what seems to be identical stuff.

I bought some very nice lab books from Eureka Lab Book (Holyoke MA) at one point - these were big enough that you could paste in a full 8.5x11" sheet of paper and still have a bit of margin. They are a bit too expensive for ordinary use though.

[Edward Vielmetti]

In some other life, I would write in my notebooks more, and type on the internets less.

I'm still looking for a system which is flexible enough that would let me type in a relatively ordinary page in my quad notebook and have it show up on the screen more or less intact.

The observation from some use of Moleskines is that the screen is landscape but the notebook is portrait, so actually laying out the page as written on screen is unlikely to be the way that I normally see each screen.